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Hitting a Wall: When You Can’t Study | ||
Tags: Burn-out | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4135 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes  Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 9 of 23 29 July 2013 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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I think that it's key to understand your motivation. If I were studying Spanish just to
study it, I don't think I'd last long. But I'm studying Spanish so that I can talk to people. And because talking to people is my goal, I spend a good chunk of my time talking on Skype with language partners. And because I want to be able to actually say stuff to my language partners, I'm much more motivated to study. Instead of starting with a schedule, why don't you start with your motivation and work backwards? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4838 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 10 of 23 29 July 2013 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Oh, that's easy. I live in Japan, therefore I need to know Japanese. Simple as that. I want to be able to talk to the people around me, read the newspapers, watch the TV programs, etc., etc. I've spent years here doing on-again, off-again studying of Japanese, but what keeps me coming back is the motivation to learn Japanese so that I can communicate with people around me. In the past year, I've made it a point to talk to people in Japanese as much as I can. I talk to my neighbors, I talk to fellow teachers at the school where I work, I talk to people at the gym, I talk to store clerks when I go shopping. I enjoy those moments, except when I can't think of the right words to say. That is why I need to study. The motivation is certainly there. Everyday I get on the train, or I take a lunch break, and immediately I think: "OK, how should I study with this time?" I have the urge to study something in Japanese every day. (By the way, those of you that follow my log can understand how AMAZING it is that I even have that feeling now!) It's just that I don't want to do the activities that I've been doing. I get bored when I do them, but I get absolutely frustrated when I am not studying, because I want to. If that is not motivation, then I don't know what is. I feel the same way with Portuguese. Maybe not as intensely, because I don't see Portuguese speakers around me every day - although they are here in Japan! My goal is to be able to communicate with them when I meet them. The motivation is there for Portuguese as well. So I don't think motivation is the problem. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4838 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 11 of 23 29 July 2013 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Sorry for the two posts in a row.
Yeah, maybe I do need to take it easy for a little while, like emk and kanewai were talking about. Just relaxing with some Japanese TV might be the cure for my ills. It occurred to me that I don't give enough respect to extensive activities. The TV in my house is on every day, and I watch at least an hour daily of Japanese TV. But I don't count that as "study". In fact, I feel that I'm not really doing anything when watching TV in Japanese. But emk said that his extensive activities helped him considerably, so I think I need to take extensive activities more seriously (for lack of a better word... more fun-ly? I mean, watching extensive TV doesn't seem serious. I don't know...). Perhaps my brain is tired of all the intensive reading, textbook, and intensive listening activities. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5253 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 12 of 23 29 July 2013 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Kuji, TV and podcasts can be active activities also, if you so choose. First, I'll tell you what I do with the activity. I watch a "novela" called "Gabriela" that was originally broadcast on Globo TV in 2012. I started with episode 1 and am now on episode 31. The episodes are almost 40 minutes long and there's no transcript available of which I am aware. There's no subtitles or closed captions either. I watch the episode passively at first. I download it to my hard drive and watch it again the next day and write down the words I don't know, which are few these days. At the same time I'm writing my own detailed synopsis of what's going on in the episode, scene by scene and sometimes line by line.
When done, I use it in my tutor session with my private, online, tutor who corrects me and helps me to compose my thoughts coherently. Obviously, since you don't have a tutor, it's hard to check yourself and your grammar. What you can do as an alternative is get some type of episodic content in Japanese, dubbed or native, and find the transcript or the subtitles. Do as I've done and check your work against the transcript or subtitles. Ideally, you could find something, either a TV series or a film that has both Japanese and English subtitles that you can still download and go through it. Comprehensible input is the key. I know you like sports but sports may be above your level at present and may not contain the vocabulary you need to master about all kinds of activities concerning daily life. That's where soap operas and episodic TV come in handy. As long as you can at least tolerate the subject matter, you'll learn a lot about what you need to know about daily life. It's good listening practice. Being actively involved summarizing or even writing as much of a transcript as you can will help you to check your comprehension and work on your output as well. Cartoons would be another way to find comprehensible input. Is Sponge Bob available in Japanese dub? I remember growing up as a boy on the mainland US, reading biographies of famous baseball players. There must be books for kids in Japan about sports and/or sports figures. That might be something. For Portuguese, I'd look at the DW Learning By Ear series: "Fábulas Africanas". The language isn't overly complicated. There's an English and a Portuguese Transcript available. As an added bonus, each episode is only about 10 minutes long. Also the Centro Virtual Camões has A Aventura dos Descobrimentos and Era uma vez um Rei which has text and audio. There's no English but the language is not complex and is intended for kids. So, find something you can stomach and then try to be active with it by either doing what I do or at least taking notes. For emk it was "Buffy". For me "Gabriela" and "Flor do Caribe". It isn't "study" per se, but if you get active with it, it can be quite valuable. As others have said, there's nothing wrong with taking a break and coming back, but it sounds like it might bother you too much to stay away for too long. So when you do come back, you need to have something to add in some fun while you're engaged in more formal study. Edited by iguanamon on 29 July 2013 at 9:12pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6900 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 23 29 July 2013 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Iguanamon, muito obrigado for those links!
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5523 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 23 29 July 2013 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
iguanamon has some great advice on how to use TV intensively. His techniques focus on taking unknown material and turning it into known material. My methods were a bit more slipshod and lackadaisical. Between around October 2012 and the end of February 2013, I put a lot of time into extensive activities, and I wasn't doing much else. Frequently, I abandoned all pretense at using a dictionary and just tried to rack up pages and hours as quickly as possible. During that time, I saw very nice bumps in reading speed, and major improvements in listening comprehension. In particular, I went from understanding my wife, Buffy and the news—and not much else—to understanding a large fraction of what I saw on French TV. I can't yet explain why this worked, but I have a theory: 1. Intensive activities convert the unknown into the known. 2. Extensive activities convert decipherable material into automatic knowledge. So if I'm sitting there, really absorbed in a TV show, paying attention to the plot and trying to figure out who the Lannisters will betray next, then my comprehension is temporarily elevated. I'm using the context and the images and my state of "flow" to understand stuff I couldn't understand out of context. And once I'm in this state of elevated comprehension, I then pump a huge amount of content through my brain. And given enough exposure and repetition, a lot of the content becomes automatic. And if I chip away at the boundaries of my knowledge like this, those boundaries will eventually move. I also try to pay attention to the language when doing extensive activities. When reading, for example, I often try to consciously notice 3 or 4 interesting details per page: "What a nice turn of phrase! Oh, that word is feminine. How weird." Watching a lot of TV is not a miracle technique. :-) And I suspect that if you leave out the extensive activities entirely, your progress will probably slow down. But if you're feeling burnt out, you could do a lot worse than to watch some cool Japanese TV shows. Edited by emk on 29 July 2013 at 11:45pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4838 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 15 of 23 30 July 2013 at 2:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Wow, so much useful advice here! First of all, thank you all! This is why I keep coming back to HTLAL, even with all the technical glitches to the forum. HTLAL has been as useful as anything else to keep me encouraged and motivated while learning Japanese and Portuguese.
Let me get this straight... you write your own detailed synopsis line by line? That sounds quite intensive - but I guess it sounds intensive for me because I don't know a lot of words yet. I suppose it gets easier the more I learn. I also guess the key is to find something that I like and will keep me captivated - and is also comprehensible. There is a Japanese cartoon I watch every Sunday evening with my wife. It is comprehensible and it talks about daily Japanese life, which I like. The problem is that I just watch each episode once, when it is broadcast. While watching, I jot down some words I don't know and look them up after the show. I've learned some vocabulary that way, but I always wonder if I could get more out of it. Recording the show is not an option; when we are at home together (which is basically whenever we are not at work), the TV is my wife's. :) So I can't just take the TV to watch a show over and over. If there was a way I could get the episodes on my computer, and even transfer it to my Walkman, that would be nice. I guess I'll just settle for Japanese dramas, which are available at some websites, if I recall correctly.
It probably is. I see girls and even women in their 20s and 30s around here with little Sponge Bob dolls on their purses.
That reminds me... I still have the Futebol episodes that you recommended to me. I spent considerable time going through the first scene or two, just looking up every word that was unknown. I had the bilingual text, but for some reason I still have an urge to look up every single word I don't know. It's like I don't trust the English transcript. Anyway, that became quite tedious. So one day a few weeks ago, I just quit looking up words in the dictionary, and I just listened to the audio a few times while looking at the Portuguese transcript. I looked at the English script a couple of times just to get the gist of the story, but after that I just listened to the Portuguese over and over - sometimes with the Portuguese transcript, and sometimes without. I doubt that I learned any of that Portuguese, but it was more enjoyable that way. I was enjoying the language and its sounds, but I also had an idea about what was going on in the story.
See, this is what I am afraid of. Time and time again, I've taken a break, only to have that break turn into months of nothing. I told myself last year that I'm not going to let that happen again. I don't know... maybe I could take a week off and set a Google Calendar reminder a week from now, reminding me to get my butt back to studying. Thanks for the links, by the way!
This is hard for me to do without feeling the need to write it down somewhere, or put it into Anki. But then again, maybe extensive activities are not as extensive as I make them out to be. I picture extensive reading as just sitting down with a book, just reading, and not really caring about the unknown information - just letting it "soak in", if you will. But even with extensive reading, it seems that there is a bit of activeness going on. You still need to actively notice the things that you don't know, and spend time trying to figure out what it means. With TV shows, maybe you have to pause it and think about something you just heard, or maybe play it back again. Am I right?
I'm probably the last person in the world to think that. :) Because I've watched hours upon hours of Japanese TV for ten years, and I don't think I had any benefit from it.
Yeah, this is probably what has happened to my progress. Thank you all for the advice! The more I read this thread, the more I think I need to include more extensive activities into my routine. The challenge will be not to turn those activities into intensive ones. I think that is what I need to figure out how to do from this point on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5253 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 16 of 23 30 July 2013 at 4:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I was lucky and found my current programs online which I can download to mp4 video for multiple viewing with the Firefox addon: FlashVideoDownloader. I also have a tutor who likes the method.
Read extensively and broadly, even stuff that may be above your level and stuff that may not be all that fascinating. (I know that goes against the typical advice. Just keep the boring stuff, and the stuff that's above your level, short.) Watch extensively as well. Doing that helps you to achieve critical mass. Not doing enough or quitting too soon means you won't reach that critical mass and there will be no chain reaction. I couldn't care less about the Japanese Stock Market, but by listening to the NHK World news in Portuguese, I will never forget its associated vocabulary. It even taught me the PT word for "comma"- "virgula". After you hear the word "virgula" in every report for a month or two and see it in the transcript, you can't help but learn it. You never know what you may learn from a source that may not be all that exciting. The Nikkei report only lasts about 30 seconds or so. I can take listening to the riveting history of 17th century Elbonian tiddlywinks for that long, but I wouldn't listen to an hour of it, or even 10 minutes of it. What's good about television and films are the visual clues that you get. As long as you listen and watch mindfully, you'll learn a lot. Emk's advice is great! Boa sorte, kuji! Edited by iguanamon on 30 July 2013 at 4:04am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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